The Russian reporter who exposed the forced marriage of an underage Chechen girl to a local police chief last month is being “threatened with murder” according to the newspaper she writes for. Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s last independent media outlets, has appealed to President Putin’s

About a hundred journalists, human rights campaigners and activists have been jailed before tomorrow’s inaugural European Games in Azerbaijan, in which a host of British athletes will compete. International rights groups say that they have been barred from entering the country while internal

On the edge of the historic provincial town where the Romanovs, Russia’s most famous dynasty, took power, President Putin’s fiercest domestic critic last night rekindled his attempt to topple the modern-day tsar. Alexei Navalny is back on the campaign trail after two years mired in criminal

President Obama launched a fierce personal attack on Vladimir Putin’s “wrong-headed desire to recreate the glories of the Soviet empire” as leaders of the world’s top industrial nations warned that they were prepared to extend sanctions on Russia despite their ruinous economic impact. The American

President Putin’s ambitious plans to build a huge modern navy capable of projecting Russian power around the world have been torpedoed by the war in Ukraine. Moscow relies on Ukrainian factories to produce vital components for its new naval vessels, a relationship that dates back to Soviet times

The eldest daughter of the murdered Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has left the country after receiving threats. Zhanna Nemtsova warned that all critics of President Putin’s government were in danger. The former journalist has accused the Russian leader of being “politically responsible

President Poroshenko yesterday alerted Ukrainians to the “colossal threat” of an imminent summer offensive by Russian and local separatist forces in the east after the region’s worst battle in months. Western powers expressed alarm at the sudden surge in fighting on Wednesday, which saw both sides

A stretch of Ukraine’s front line erupted in flames yesterday as a pitched battle featuring tanks, heavy artillery and hundreds of fighters threatened a return to full-blown hostilities. The separatist assault on the town of Mariinka, about ten miles west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, began

A former “Kremlin troll” has lifted the lid on a Russian internet company that floods the web with pro-Putin propaganda. Lyudmila Savchuk, a civic activist, has gone to court to try to shut down the shadowy organisation, which is alleged to have tried to foment panic in the United States by

The fog of war that settled on east Ukraine a year ago is, just possibly, beginning to clear a little. Sporadic fighting is continuing and in some places, such as Shirokine, it is intense enough to make a mockery of the ceasefire agreed in February. However, the violence is also more localised and